Olga Ignatovich: In The Shadow of The Big Brother
Olga Ignatovich: In The Shadow of The Big Brother
At «PANDA platforma» in Berlin, we are able to show only a small portion of the recently discovered archive. Arthur Bondar’s find is represented far more fully in a book published last year, running to nearly 500 pages, whose title has lent the exhibition its name.
According to some sources, Olga Vsevolodovna Ignatovich (July 24, 1905 – March 21, 1984) was born in the city of Slutsk (Belarus); according to others, she was born in the city of Łódź (Poland). She was the younger sister of the famous Soviet photojournalist and experimentalist in the field of the visual language of photography, Boris Vsevolodovich Ignatovich. Together with her brother, she worked at the newspaper “Bednota” and the magazine “Narpit”, and from the mid-1930s, at the newspaper “Vechernyaya Moskva”. Olga was a member of the “Ignatovich Brigade”. Boris also encouraged his two other sisters to take up photography, but only Olga demonstrated outstanding talent.
When German troops began their invasion of Soviet territory, Olga Ignatovich enlisted in the Red Army in November 1941 as a war photojournalist. Among Olga Ignatovich’s most notable war photography works are: a series of photographs from liberated Rzhev, a series of photographs of famous pilots on the Kalinin Front (1942), and the Red Army’s advance westward under the command of Marshals Zhukov and Konev (1944–45). A separate chapter in Olga Ignatovich’s photographic legacy is her special assignment to photograph the German death camps of Majdanek (1944) and Auschwitz-Birkenau (1945). For a long time, the authorship of the world-famous photographs titled “The Liberation of Auschwitz” was attributed to Olga’s brother, Boris Ignatovich.
Most of Olga Ignatovich’s photographic archive for many years was considered to be lost until it was recently discovered by photographer and collector Artur Bondar. Bondar also managed to find the grave of Olga Ignatovich, who died on March 21, 1984, and was buried at the Khimki Cemetery in Moscow.
Archive Collection: Arthur Bondar
Curator: Roman Ekimov
Place: PANDA platforma (Berlin, Germany)
Year: 2026
